by Les Weil
Lat could feel the slow tap of his heart, tapping blood toward hands and feet and parts that blood would never reach. Slow pulse on pulse, and blood enough to feed the mind, which sharpened as the body failed, as if God let a man have one last look before blowing out the lamp. He needed to turn over, to huddle closer in his covers, and by and by, when he found the will and strength, he'd do so. After a while. Everything in time. Easier to lie cold than to move.
Was it angels on the wing, that far-off rustle? The dark angel soon to take him to the Light? Or the devil riding? It was nothing. It was whatever crazy thing the mind made up. And it didn't matter. Angel or devil, up or down, let it come, harps and golden streets or fire and brimstone.
A dog barked outside, and the young buck here in the tent spoke out in his sleep and breathed short and shallow afterwards, as if the one word had worn him out. Two for the Light then. Two for hell's heat. A pair for the happy hunting grounds. The music blew closer, faded out.
Tom was trying to rub himself warm again, his hands in the dark sounding harsh against clothing and skin. Better to be so near dead as no longer to care. But thanks, Tom, for sticking. Thanks for not making a break when you might have. Thanks for it all. Will you see the grave's covered with rocks so the wolves won't get to it? God restoreth the soul, but the body still likes to be kept in one piece, not gnawed on and chewed up and left scattered as filth. You can understand that, Tom?
A little gust of wind worried the tepee and cried away, and another came in its place, and another, running ahead of the breeze that began to blow steady.
So that was the music. That was the rustle of wings. The warning of wind where winds always blew and after the warning the wind. That was all there was to it.
Nothing looked so big at the last. What were women then, or a girl that he could see just as a flash of yellow hair? What did it matter that Tom could be so coarse, or that he himself had felt guilty thinking so? What was sin, or punishment if it did come? What was home and the drawn-off memories of it? What was life or death, and where was the mortal dread? The little things counted, like deciding whether to move, like feeling the cold as something close and far off at the same time and letting it have its way, like struggling against a cough because a cough hurt. A person just waited.
He felt he could turn now, and he eased over and brought his knees to his middle, and slowly it came to seem that he was warm at last, warm and comfortable and drowsy as it was said a freezing man came to be. A good way to die then, with nothing hurting and the mind swimming out into sleep.
Tom wakened him with a tap on the cheek. "Hey, boy! Hey?"
"What?"
The smudge of Tom's face in the dawn light of the tepee broke wide in a smile. Lat, by God she came! The chinook came! Warm as spring outside!"
The warm wind kept blowing, the dry wind out of the southwest where a cloud bank sat low and dark on the skyline. In a day it lapped up most of the snow, baring patches of earth furred with last season's grass which the gaunt horses snatched at under saddle and cropped into the mud on night picket. In two days it made next to nothing of drifts once head high and higher. And still it kept blowing, until the whole body of earth lay brown and breathing except for the topknots of buttes and, away and away, the high float of mountains.
Out of somewhere came magpies and snowbirds by dozens.
The Indian children wiggled out from under their robes. The bucks loosened their wraps. The squaws dared to chatter. The horses walked with new life. Under a wide-sailing sun small bunches of antelope stood and watched and took alarm and circled away, their rumps shining whiter than the remembered white of the land.
Riding and resting, Lat tried on his tongue the words for this wind. Chinook. Promise of spring. Breath of the dark cloud, the long, singing breath. Life-saver. Soul-saver.
One soul, not two. By a miracle Hole-in-the-Leg rode his horse still, but his leg bloated his pants leg and bulged through the slits cut to allow for the swell. Not even pride could keep him these days from riding one-sided. His face was as old as the face of suffering, as young-old as the face of a sure-to-die child. His eyes stared ahead as if opened on things beyond this earth and this sky and this close windriffle of grass. But the hard present will of him showed, chiseled in cheeks and chin. The sight of him soured the rest of the band. The bucks would be going along, glad for the wind and the warmth, and one or another of them would happen to look, and the face he turned would have turned ugly and he'd pat his gun. Around camp they poked orders. They growled at giving up scraps of meat. They encouraged the squaws to point and make dirty motions like those of dehorning a man.
Only the old chief kept apart. Like a father he rode along silent and set-faced, his gaze going often to Hole-in-the-Leg, and at the fire stayed close by his side. There he burned grass he had gathered and into the blaze sprinkled pinches of stuff from a pouch, saying medicine words as he did so and making a clack with some kind of rattle. Afterwards he stared at Hole-in-the-Leg as if through his eyes he could lend him his strength.
Once, seemingly, he argued to pitch camp and stay there for the sake of his son, and the rest of the bucks gathered round and talked back, and the next day they went on, though Hole-in-the-Leg had to be dragged along in a travois like the children.
"You watch them two like you was sorry," Tom said to Lat. It was early night, and they sat cross-legged at a little distance from the others. A squaw passing them stooped and reached toward Tom with one hand and made believe to get a handful and to cut it off with the other. "Louse-bound sow!" Tom said as she left. "Lat, sure as Hole-in-the-Leg cashes in, they aim to scalp us or worse." The camp fire had died to a blown spark. The mother of the two children, in the darkness looking more than ever like a walking sack, was herding the two little walking sacks to their tepee. One buck grunted to another, and the other grunted back, and both fell silent, having said in two grunts all there was to be said.
"Listen, Lat! You ain't even listenin'."
The chief sat silent and unmoving by his son's side, his head bent and his hawk's nose catching a little of the firelight against the shadow of his face. After a while he would help Hole-in-the-Leg to the tepee, but now, right after supper, he let him rest under a buffalo robe spread near the fire.
"I thought you was crazy back there, talkin' in your sleep about comin' out the best man, but this is sure-enough crazy, feelin' sorry for 'em."
It was enough to sit quiet with the warm wind blowing, to sit dog-tired after another day in the saddle, and slow and deep inside to feel the body knitting. As another body wasn't. He didn't want to talk, but still he said, "They don't know the first thing about doctoring."
"It ain't no skin off'n you that they burn smoke and shake rattles, thinkin' to cure him."
"No," Lat said. In his mind's eye were those waiting-todie eyes. Grandpa could tell the chief how to work on a fester. A horse sneezed in the darkness and went back to ripping the grass roots, and a couple of night birds cried back and forth, asking each other, please, would things be all right, and somewhere a dog growled out no, not if left up to him.
"We ain't doctors, either, and if we set up to be and still he died, there'd right away be three to bury." "You just said we'd die anyhow."
"That's what I'm comin' to. We got to make a break." Tom's head turned toward the scar-cheeked buck who was keeping an eye on them, his gun close at hand. "They're watchin' us closer'n ever, thinkin' you might be well enough to skedaddle."
"Not yet, Tom."
"Got to be soon. That son-of-a-bitch might croak any time." Tom waited for an answer. "You ain't even got the gumption to be scared!"
Fear was a thing remembered. The leap in the chest, the suck of breath, the knot in the stomach -these belonged to strength and full blood. Weakness and tiredness just made a man wonder. "When the time's right," he said. "I'm dead for sleep now."
The next day they came to a river, to a sheet of treebordered ice so broad that it had to be the Missouri. T
he chief made them line out, so as not to put too much weight in one place, and led them across fast, the horses sinking hoof-deep in the top slush and snorting at the growl of live water beneath.
Although it was no later than mid-afternoon and two of the men seemed to want to go on, the chief ordered camp pitched in a broad gully leading down to the stream. While the squaws rustled wood and one buck went hunting for meat, the chief helped his son from the hammock and put him down on a robe and sat there and sat there; and Holein-the-Leg was no better but worse, his eyes like drying potholes in the dried plains of his face.
As the sun edged the westward bluffs and dusk began to smoke the river valley, the chief rose and faced around to the north where a bald hill lifted close. He took a breath and set out for it, his feet working slow in the mud. Lat watched him climb, watched the tired pull and hoist of his moccasins and the upward creep of his figure. High up, the slanting sun touched him, glowing like firelight on his buckskins. He stopped at the top and sat down, facing this last light, and the trunk of his body moved back and forth as if saying, "Please, if it be thy will," to the gods of the sun and the sky and the empty land. For a long time he sat there, his figure bronze and then black against the great arch of sky, and then he got up and lagged down, his face set, and went to the boy and saw that the potholes had closed over.
A cry wrenched out of him, a half cry choked off at the instant of sound as if crying wasn't for men. It left nothing but silence and unspoken ache, left nothing to do but the one thing.
Lat got up and went to them, and the way of Grandpa's treatment stood clear in his mind. "Me doctor."
"Lat!" The word came from behind him. He bent over. Hands grabbed him from the side. They belonged to two bucks who yanked him up. He twisted free, feeling the tear of his own wound. "Lat! Goddam it!" The hands grabbed him again, and the chief spoke throaty from the ground, and the bucks loosened their holds. The chief had his own hand up. He spoke some more. The bucks backed away. The chief's eyes were waiting questions.
"Medicine," Lat said. "Cure him, could be."
The questions stood sharp, stood doubtful and wondering, and then the chief bowed as he had on the hill, lowering both body and head.
Bucks and squaws and young ones and even the camp dogs formed a ring around Lat. He pointed to a kettle and then down the slope to the river. "Water. Get water." At grunted words from the chief the fat-rumped squaw waddled to the kettle and started for the stream. The fire was too small, and he set about to make it bigger himself, but the chief spoke again, and another squaw began piling on wood.
"Need knife," Lat said. "Knife." A buck touched his arm. He was holding one out.
Hole-in-the-Leg lay under a blanket, still breathing, still hot with live fever. Like an overstuffed casing his legging peeled away at the push of the knife, and the released flesh bloated out. At the rim of firelight two feet trudged and halted close. It was the squaw with the water. A point to the fire took her away. Up and down from the scabbed ends of the wound the poison was cooking, sending red streamers into the thigh from the purpled swell of the knee and the calf. The toes, even, were fat, like the toes of some monster baby.
The leg was laid bare. The kettle was heating. Needed now were some cloths and a forked stick, one with a long shaft. "Blanket," he told the chief, touching the one the chief had drawn over his neck. "Soogan for medicine." The chief took his own off and handed it over and watched without movement or speech while Lat cut it in pieces and dropped one piece in the kettle and the others close by.
Now for the forked stick. He would have to find it himself. Not through his words or his signs could they understand. He moved to the edge of the circle, and the edge opened for him. "Get stick," he told the chief before going on. They let him go, all of them silent, the bucks, the squaws, the old chief, but not Tom, who stood back, for the moment forgotten, and blocked the way.
"What in hell, Lat!"
"Got to."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Turn the other cheek, and we both lose our ass!"
"Call it crazy, but I couldn't just let him die, Tom."
"I got a notion to make a run for it, that's what! Plenty of chances with them so interested in you makin' medicine."
"I couldn't keep up with you anyhow, and no other partner would have stuck half as long. Do what you think best and be awful careful and don't be sore at me, Tom. I'm forever obliged as it is."
Tom's face went soft and uncertain. He bent it from sight and scuffed at the ground. "You'd've done the same," he said, "and you know goddam well I'm not takin' off now."
Lat touched his arm and walked on to a willow bush where in the darkness he found a crotched stem. He cut it and trimmed it and sharpened the end of the shaft.
The water was hot when he got back. He fished out the piece of blanket and dropped in another and took the first over and swathed the sick leg.
Later he used the second piece and later a third and a fourth and later the first one reheated; and the late stars came on to shine like other eyes watching, joining those of the chief and the bucks and the squaws and the fire-glinted eyes of the dogs, all taking cold note of how he had to drag slower and slower from kettle to leg and to kettle again.
But the time had come anyhow, if it ever was coming. He signaled to build up the fire so's to have light and skinned down the last swathe, baring the top scab, and with his knife worked at its softened crust. He had thought when it came off that the pus would well out as if a cork had been pulled; instead, it leaked up in slow beads, too slow and too small to drain out the corruption. He lifted the leg and flaked off the underneath scab and again got only an ooze.
So there was just one thing to do, according to Grandpa. He lowered the leg and lifted his knife and took careful sight and drove the blade in, hearing the quick mutter of the Indians around him. Hole-in-the-Leg didn't murmur or move. He might have been dead, except that up from the pull of the knife sprang a sick stream. A jab underneath let out another.
Lat forced his forked stick in the ground and lifted the leg and set the heel in the crotch for good drainage and raised his eyes to the watchers. They had gathered close. They showed no anger, no thanks, nothing that a white man could read.
Let them spare him or kill him. All he wanted was rest. He rose and by motions attempted to tell them to keep hot packs on the leg. As he started away, Hole-in-the-Leg let out a long, groaning sigh, of pain or relief.
15
THE CHIEF led the way, riding easy on his knot-head of a pony while the wind played with his braids. The others strung back from him, going along easy, too, as if now and at last they could almost afford to relax, though twice they had veered away from their set course, once to avoid meeting up with a freight train and again a little party of horsemen. Behind Lat the squaws kept up a chatter, maybe telling that here was their brother, their white brother, maker of the big medicine. To the west was a lake, shored white with alkali, and ahead to the north two side-by-side buttes with a gap in between, and all floated tiny, rocked by the wind, in the billows of space. Space had no beginning and no end, or the wind, either, and so neither was real, and a man pinched himself but still dreamed.
Lat looked back at Tom, whose eyes were like eggs in the black nest of his whiskers, and farther back at the squaws, at the fat squaw; and it was night again in the riverside gully, and Hole-in-the-Leg had come to his senses and his leg slendered down. And the scarred Indian was saying, while he waved toward his wife, "My squaw, you squaw. You take 'im." The fat squaw was smiling and nodding. She still nodded, and the buck, too, as if both understood, after he stuttered, "Bad medicine. Poison he come back to Injun. Spirit say no."
The chief pointed his horse toward the gap between the two waving buttes.
Or it was later, and Tom Ping was saying, "You should have took on that old hay bag. I would have, even if I don't like 'em so hefty. The closer the bone the sweeter the meat." But it was old Colly speaking, his wo
rds wind-borne across miles and time, old Colly at last making sense: the closer the mountains the sweeter the chinook, the sweeter the chinook the better the range. That's it, eh, Colly?
The buttes reared and steadied as they rode through, and ahead a broad valley slept in the blown sunlight, and a stream slept, and trees.
The better the range the better the beef they butchered by night, above a distant scatter of lights which Lat could hear Ram Butler saying was Sun River, not so far, boy, from the trail over from Oregon. Stolen beef, but they were hungry. To cover up, one of the bucks had skinned out the figure 4 brand and cut off the cropped ears and buried them all in an old badger hole.
"Lat?" Tom rode alongside, his face turned and the nest of his whiskers flattening out with the wind. "Thought you said we'd cut loose today, now we know pretty well where we are?"
They could have cut loose before, could have struck out as they pleased, in any direction, after Hole-in-the-Leg began to get well. The bucks had quit riding herd on them then and with ceremony had turned back their guns, and the squaws smiled instead of making out to unman them. But for want of a better choice they had stuck, being out of danger and, till last night, hazy about their location.
"What do you say?" The wind took the words from Tom's mouth, leaving just their echo in the eyes squinched against it.
"Pretty soon. From what I can make out, the chief's got a spot picked."
"He don't have to show us."
"Wait."
They didn't wait long. A little farther on the chief pulled his horse in and looked back, telling them without words to come up. The rest of the bunch straggled up, too, but, except for Hole-in-the-Leg, kept a few feet apart, giving them council room.
The chief pointed east, to the valley and stream that curved east from the north and lost themselves in the folding reaches of plain. He raised his hand without changing direction, pointing still farther, to the end of the earth, to the wash-up of land against sky. "Benton," he said. "Go all same river."